Coetzee, Writer of Apartheid As Bleak Mirror, Wins Nobel

By ALAN RIDING

Published: October 3, 2003

PARIS, Oct. 2—
J. M. Coetzee, a widely acclaimed South African novelist who has often used his country's apartheid system and its post-apartheid transition to mirror the bleakness of the human condition, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm.

Mr. Coetzee, 63, who has long been considered a contender for the $1.3 million prize, became the fourth Nobel literature laureate from Africa, after Wole Soyinka of Nigeria in 1986, Naguib Mahfouz of Egypt in 1988 and Nadine Gordimer of South Africa in 1991. This year's other Nobel winners are to be announced next week, including the Peace Prize winner on Oct. 10.

The 18-member academy pointed to the broad sweep of Mr. Coetzee's fiction. ''A fundamental theme in Coetzee's novels involves the values and conduct resulting from South Africa's apartheid system, which, in his view, could arise anywhere,'' it said. [An appraisal by Michiko Kakutani, Page A6.]

The academy praised the ''well-crafted composition, pregnant dialogue and analytical brilliance'' of Mr. Coetzee's novels. ''But at the same time,'' it said, ''he is a scrupulous doubter, ruthless in his criticism of the cruel rationalism and cosmetic morality of Western civilization.'' And it added, ''It is in exploring weakness and defeat that Coetzee captures the divine spark in man.''

Mr. Coetzee's best-known novels are ''Waiting for the Barbarians''; ''Life and Times of Michael K,'' which won the Booker Prize in Britain in 1983; ''The Master of Petersburg''; and ''Disgrace,'' which received the Booker Prize in 1999, making Mr. Coetzee the first writer to win it twice. He has also published books of essays and two memoirs, ''Boyhood'' and ''Youth.''

In his novels Mr. Coetzee turns an existentialist spotlight on individual behavior. ''At the decisive moment Coetzee's characters stand behind themselves, motionless, incapable of taking part in their own actions,'' the Swedish Academy noted. ''But passivity is not merely the dark haze that devours personality; it is also the last resort open to human beings as they defy an oppressive order by rendering themselves inaccessible to its intentions.''

Tall and slim with a neatly trimmed white beard, John Maxwell Coetzee (pronounced kut-SEE-uh) belongs to a generation of South African writers -- including Alan Paton, Dennis Brutus, Athol Fugard and Ms. Gordimer -- whose members raised their voices against apartheid. But unlike some of his colleagues who campaigned actively against that racist system, Mr. Coetzee has always shied from the limelight and rarely gives interviews. (His middle name at birth was Michael, but he changed that to Maxwell before using just his initials.)

Typically, he did not attend the Booker award ceremonies, and the Swedish Academy was also unable to find him to inform him of the Nobel Prize before it was announced. He learned of the award in Chicago on Thursday morning.

''I received the news in a phone call from Stockholm at 6 a.m.,'' he said in a statement issued by the University of Chicago, where he was teaching a seminar at the Committee on Social Thought. ''It came as a complete surprise -- I was not even aware that the announcement was pending.''

Ms. Gordimer was among the writers and critics praising the choice. ''He's a colleague and a friend and it is a wonderful thing that the Nobel Prize has come to South Africa again,'' she told The Associated Press.

The reaction in South Africa underscored a long debate over Mr. Coetzee's career. Admirers there view him as unflinchingly honest in his portrayal of the nation's racial and political conflicts before and after apartheid. His critics say he made a name for himself by sensationalizing South Africa's violence and then abandoned the country.

Stephen Gray, a South African poet, said Mr. Coetzee's emigration to Australia in 2002 fueled the debate about whether he was loyal to South Africa. While some writers said that they felt South Africa needed them to work actively for change, he said, Mr. Coetzee always remained aloof. ''Most sophisticated readers think of him as writer who writes for overseas,'' he said.

While Mr. Coetzee is very much a South African writer, his peripatetic and often reclusive life may have served his fiction by giving him a certain distance from the troubles of his home country. After graduating from college in South Africa in 1961 with a degree in mathematics, he followed the example of many white liberal intellectuals like himself and traveled to Britain, where he worked as a computer programmer.

Four years later he moved to the United States and taught English to freshmen while pursuing graduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin. From 1968 he taught literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo before returning home in 1983 to become a professor of English literature at the University of Cape Town. In 2002 he moved to Australia, where he is an honorary research fellow at the University of Adelaide.

Jonathan Lear, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago who is teaching a course with Mr. Coetzee this semester, said: ''One of the things he looks at, which other people including myself lack the courage to look at, is human cruelty and insensitivity as it occurs in all sort of contexts. If you read his work, it's really a surgical, clinical diagnosis of what's going on here, and it's not pretty. On the other hand, he has an amazing human passion that is very clear even when he's describing the worst things people do to one another. He's asking what are the conditions of our salvation and damnation.''